Boing Boing » Jacques Valleehttp://boingboing.net
Brain candy for Happy MutantsSun, 02 Aug 2015 19:28:50 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.2What Ockham really saidhttp://boingboing.net/2013/02/11/what-ockham-really-said.html
http://boingboing.net/2013/02/11/what-ockham-really-said.html#commentsMon, 11 Feb 2013 19:17:49 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=212258
Born in England, Franciscan monk William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347) is among the most prominent figures in the history of philosophy during the High Middle Ages. The Skeptics Dictionary quotes the Razor as Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate, or “plurality should not be posited without necessity," while Wikipedia defines Ockham's razor as follows:

“Among competing hypotheses, the one that makes the fewest assumptions should be selected.”

Brother Ockham, however, said nothing of the kind. Later philosophers have put these words into his mouth for their own convenience.

Here is what he wrote, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

“Nothing ought to be posited without a reason given, unless it is self-evident or known by experience or proved by the authority of Sacred Scripture.”

So let’s come back to the planets, and apply Ockham’s razor–as formulated by the man himself–to a comparison between two different hypotheses about their motion.

The contemporary consensus states that they revolve around the sun according to the Copernican system, Kepler’s laws of motion and Newton’s model of gravity, as demonstrated by complex observations and significant mathematical underpinning.

Our alternative hypothesis simply states that they are moved around the sky by angels, as illustrated in this beautiful painting from the Breviari d’amor of Matfre Ermengaud, where a convenient gear mechanism is gracefully activated to regulate planetary motion. Ermengaud was a contemporary of Ockham and, like him, a Franciscan friar.

Were we to apply Ockham's formulation of the razor literally, the choice between these two hypotheses is clear. It does not favor the first hypothesis, the standard scientific interpretation. The Scriptures clearly state that angels do exist, and their reality was re-affirmed by Pope John Paul II as recently as August 1986. Since they manifest through their actions in the heavens, the second hypothesis appears far more parsimonious and elegant than the complicated rationalizations used by mathematicians and astronomers, which involve unseen entities such as the acceleration of gravity, centrifugal force, and mass, which - to this day - raise issues that science is yet to resolve. If you seriously believe in angels, then the contemporary consensus about planetary motion is a case of “plurality without necessity.”

The second hypothesis is also more powerful since angels can just as easily move the planets around the earth as around the sun. They can do whatever they like—and thereby explain any phenomena.

Perhaps we should be more careful when we quote ancient authors out of context, or twist their words to fit the convenient modern tenets of skepticism in the name of Reason. The Scriptures are full of ghosts, UFOs and examples of telepathy - which means that such phenomena cannot be dissected and thrown out using Ockham’s razor anyway.

We know, of course, that the planets revolve around the Sun, an idea that would have shocked Ockham. And I firmly believe that, in philosophy and in science we should go on selecting the hypothesis that makes the fewest assumption when confronted with competing explanations, and one should not multiply entities beyond necessity -- even if Brother William never said so.

But we should also remember that nature is not parsimonious at all.]]>

http://boingboing.net/2013/02/11/what-ockham-really-said.html/feed130Futures Impossible : a new methodology to study world eventshttp://boingboing.net/2011/09/15/futures-impossible-a-new-methodology-to-study-world-events.html
http://boingboing.net/2011/09/15/futures-impossible-a-new-methodology-to-study-world-events.html#commentsThu, 15 Sep 2011 18:36:50 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=117737Year 2000, or the forecasting of complex interaction among many variables, as in the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth and Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb.]]>
The study of the future, as a scientific and intellectual endeavor, used to be driven by the careful extrapolation of trends, as in Herman Kahn’s Year 2000, or the forecasting of complex interaction among many variables, as in the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth and Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb. The technologies behind these studies relied on the mathematical tools of operations research developed during World War Two and on methods for the aggregation of expert opinion such as the Delphi Technique, developed at Rand and the Institute for the Future.

The scenarios and forecasts built on this technical base were supplemented by the study of a few extreme hypothetical situations known as “wild cards” or “black swans” (major earthquake in Tokyo, terrorist attack in New York, asteroid strike in Western Europe) designed to stretch the borders of the crisis management maps and to stimulate our collective thought process—while remaining within the domain of the Possible.

Such techniques for describing the future and anticipating its opportunities and dangers have largely become obsolete because of the acceleration of technology itself and the increasing vulnerability of our society to chaotic processes that are not well behaved under most classic models.

In the world of the 21st century, the situations faced by decision-makers in government and industry are of a wholly different nature. In an economic environment where General Motors could go bankrupt in one week, and Lehman Brothers in one afternoon, the extrapolation of trends and the wisdom of experts are still relevant, but a new methodology is needed to deal with unforeseen discontinuities. Neither of the above catastrophes was a “wild card” in anyone’s scenario. No classical futurist could imagine such discontinuities because the tools to anticipate and describe them were not available: they were truly “impossible,” just as the Fukushima nuclear disaster was deemed “impossible” by the General Electric experts who built the plant and the Japanese authorities who managed it. Similarly, as a society, we seem to be incapable of imagining healthy, positive “impossibilities” such as reconciliation in Palestine, an end to terrorism, or a world without starvation.

At the Institute for the Future, a team headed up by Bob Johansen, Kathi Vian and myself has begun to develop a typology of Impossible Futures, starting from four classes of events:

A. Some futures are deemed impossible because they would require an extraordinary convergence of several scenarios, each of which has very low probability. The bankruptcy of General Motors (Fortune One!) in one week is a case in point.

B. Some futures are deemed impossible because they would require the convergence of several scenarios on time scales that violate our knowledge of reality. The failure of the Madoff funds, for example, was deemed impossible by his investors, all of whom were successful financial experts. It happened because two low-probability events converged: (1) regulatory authorities repeatedly refused to act every time the illegal scheme was brought to their attention, and (2) the subprime crisis dried up sources of funds overnight, exposing the fraudulent structure.

C. Some futures are deemed impossible because they would require the convergence of several scenarios, including forces or components that do not exist within accepted knowledge. In A.E.Van Vogt’s novel The World of null-A (for non-Aristotelian), a secret agent named Gosseyn is repeatedly assassinated. Each time, he is reincarnated in a new body held in reserve by his masters in special sarcophagi, endowed with increased abilities. A future when Gosseyn could exist lies outside the natural limits of our scientific knowledge and culture.

D. There are futures that are deemed impossible because we simply cannot imagine them. In Saddam Hussein’s culture there was no scenario in which U.S. forces could see the movement of his forces even at night, through clouds or through dust storms. Most nations still have no concept for devices that could detect underground cavities invisible from the air or from space. Even in modern American culture, the fact that remote classified facilities can be detected, visited, and accurately described by mental powers alone remains beyond accepted concepts.

To a decision-maker in business or government, simply describing such impossible future scenarios is not helpful in the absence of a methodology for detecting, understanding, and mitigating their practical effects. What is needed is a deeper grid that can be used as an overlay to highlight radical discontinuities in technology, geopolitics, social behavior or economic patterns. We believe that such a tool needs to be developed if we want to survive the new realities where worldviews collide at an accelerated pace.
]]>http://boingboing.net/2011/09/15/futures-impossible-a-new-methodology-to-study-world-events.html/feed46Jacques Vallee's Stating The Obvious: I, Producthttp://boingboing.net/2010/10/20/jacques-vallees-stat.html
http://boingboing.net/2010/10/20/jacques-vallees-stat.html#commentsWed, 20 Oct 2010 03:10:08 +0000
Sure, Google will provide you with search results, but they are not in the search business; they are in the advertising business.]]>
You may think of yourself as a user of Google, Facebook or Amazon, but you are actually their product.

Sure, Google will provide you with search results, but they are not in the search business; they are in the advertising business. Their profits come from marketing firms that buy your behavior.

Similarly, Amazon is not in the book business, although they will send you the books you've ordered. They are in the personal information business.

The assets of modern web-based companies are the intimate profiles of those who "use" them, like you and me. Time to forget the nice pronouncements like "Do no evil" that accompany the wholesale destruction of privacy now taking place on the web, or rather within the walled gardens that companies like Facebook, Google and Apple are erecting around us on the web. Compared to them, the Chinese censors re-inventing their Great Wall are a bunch of sissies.

Any smart CEO would kill to have a product like you that doesn't cost anything and keeps renewing itself indefinitely so it can be sold and resold and resold to many different customers.

Well, who cares? Look at what we've gained: We now have access to unprecedented new riches. Movies and songs by the thousands; new "friends" by the hundreds; timely pieces of data by the millions. Our lives have become richer, more intelligent, more interesting.

The world moves on. You may have had privacy rights as a customer or a user but what makes you think you should retain those rights now that you're just a product?

The privacy we once thought was so vital: where we live, who we vote for, what we eat, what God we believe in, who we go to bed with, turns out to have been a myth, an unimportant detail in our lives. Whoever wrote the Constitution in an effort to protect it (a fact now disputed by some legal experts) was sorely out to touch with technology and ignorant of life's true values.

Or was he?

What does it mean to live in a world where the behavior of an entire population can be accurately mapped from minute to minute? A world where Procter & Gamble knows exactly what kind of toothpaste I use (and when I can be expected to run out) but also a world where government planners and politicians can subscribe to data flows from datamining experts to engineer finely-tuned programs of mass manipulation? A world where whole new social, political or religious "memes" can be injected into the culture to mold it into new forms?

People used to be up in arms when local authorities put fluoride into the water supply to strengthen kids' teeth but very few object to intelligence agencies experimenting with massive social engineering intrusions into the flow of ideas on social networks.

On a personal basis, do we really want our lives to be conditioned by an information environment that seems to expand to infinity but actually closes in around us? It closes in because we can only buy songs and "apps" from the censored files of iTunes; because all our relationships with the people we love or engage in business have been posted online for our convenience; because the very smart phone we now carry everywhere is busy filing ads filtered by sophisticated agencies to reflect our tastes; because our bank has shared our financial data with all its "affiliates:" thousands of insurance, real estate, brokerage and media firms. Like good magicians, they have mastered the art of misdirection.

Have you ever tried to "opt out" of that system to find out what lies beyond its boundaries?

In this new world our illusion of freedom is intact but our privacy has been sold out from under us. My phone is already reporting my position to its masters and to anyone who buys the information from them. It will soon "augment my reality" by leading me to restaurants matching my tastes at attractively discounted prices--restaurants where I will meet my "friends" to discuss the ideas we all believe in. How reassuring! How warm and cuddly! How convenient! Everybody knows where you are and what you're thinking about.

I tweet, therefore I am.

Uncertainty has been mastered, volatility reduced, complexity minimized. Isn't that a benefit of advanced technology? Isn't that what business should be all about? Forget 1984 and Brave New World. The men who wrote those books were dangerously naïve and not as prescient as we once believed. Instead of Big Brother looking after us, we're immersed in a dizzily delightful system that cares so much about us that it anticipates our every pleasure, like a giant planetary-class Vegas, an immense, inexhaustible Disney World. All we have to do is to preserve the illusion that we, "the users," have the power: in that ignorance, we can live happily ever after.

]]>
http://boingboing.net/2010/10/20/jacques-vallees-stat.html/feed54Stating the Obvious : If you don't have a house you don't need no sofahttp://boingboing.net/2010/07/30/stating-the-obvious.html
http://boingboing.net/2010/07/30/stating-the-obvious.html#commentsFri, 30 Jul 2010 05:41:34 +0000

OK, so I'm not an economist. But as a venture investor in early-stage medical and technology companies I read the usual financial articles that come across my screen and I see the same statistics everybody is seeing.

OK, so I'm not an economist. But as a venture investor in early-stage medical and technology companies I read the usual financial articles that come across my screen and I see the same statistics everybody is seeing. I listen to Obama and I watch the TV shows where pundits argue with Congressmen about the wisdom of this or that particular tax or stimulus measure to restart our sick economy. I have nothing to say about this, no statistics of my own and no fancy theory, so instead of taking sides in this particular debate I keep looking for the things that are missing.

What is missing is this: Over two million American families have now lost their homes; foreclosure figures are at an all-time high. Several million new families will be thrown into the street over the next year, no matter what happens to taxes or the stimulus. This is a given. Yet, among Washington and Wall Street experts this disaster is only reflected in the form of statistical figures they mix up and datamine alongside many other figures, where the numbers lose their special, tragic character.

It's not a very newsworthy disaster, either, so after a while it even fades from TV news: no dramatic shots of oil gushing up from a broken well or birds coated with black tar. No sense of urgency here, just a big spreading tragedy. The experts only know that the banks are off the hook: they have been given tons of new money to help with mortgages. The fact that this money sits unused and that many banks have not even appointed managers to deal with desperate homeowners does not come to their attention. My Bank of America branch won't even talk to you about mortgages - they send you to a faceless office downtown where nobody knows you.

In such complex situations, it is healthy for somebody to just state the obvious before trying to develop cute, complicated theories. You don't look smart by stating the obvious: Duh! Everybody knows that. You won't get invited on the CNBC morning show. You knew what I'm going to say all along but perhaps you hadn't thought it through.

So here is an obvious statement: if you have just lost your house you are not likely to go buy a new TV set for a while. If you just moved your family into a cheap motel, you probably don't think about ordering new drapes for the living room; and if you also lost your job (as thousands of people continue to do every day) and now live in your car in some urban park, you won't be shopping for refrigerators, sofas and camcorders for a long, long time to come.

Since nobody can find you because you don't have an address any more, the statisticians won't be asking for your opinion about the economy, which may explain the puzzling discrepancies in the mysterious tables called "consumer sentiment," a figure that is now at a five-month low. This "obvious" fact may also account for the lack of any serious recovery; or the probability that the economy will not be very robust for a while, no matter how "stimulating" the climate gets in Washington around election time; it may explain the chill over the Chinese industry, which makes all the refrigerators, the sofas, the TVs, the drapes and the camcorders you used to buy when you had a house to put them in; and the uncertainty in Europe, which makes the machines China needs to make TVs, camcorders, drapes and sofas. So that uncertainty travels around the planet in opposite direction to the Earth's rotation and comes back to hit us from the east, because we used to supply lots of goods and services to Europe to make the machines, etc.

No wonder Mr. Bernanke finds that things are "unusually uncertain." At least he still has his sofa.]]>

http://boingboing.net/2010/07/30/stating-the-obvious.html/feed85Jacques Vallee: Of Crop Circles, meme wars and web-based flypaperhttp://boingboing.net/2010/06/21/of-crop-circles-meme.html
http://boingboing.net/2010/06/21/of-crop-circles-meme.html#commentsMon, 21 Jun 2010 08:17:42 +0000 Based on the three earlier posts I have made on this subject, an objective reader might be justified to conclude either that crop circles are the product of hoaxes or the result of experimental military developments.]]>

Based on the three earlier posts I have made on this subject, an objective reader might be justified to conclude either that crop circles are the product of hoaxes or the result of experimental military developments. In both cases he or she would also have to admit that they represent a masterful project in social engineering.

If they are hoaxes, the authors have succeeded in capturing the attention of the world in a way that few works of art even achieve. Their productions are surrounded with mystery and the breathless suggestion of Alien contact or ancient druidic magic. The designs even hint at a cosmic signal about the future of our species.

If they are military experiments hidden in plain sight, then the social manipulation of information that serves as camouflage is a remarkable achievement. It shows that the most open form of public communication in the world, namely the web, can be used as a device to hide the reality of a massive technological effort and to distort the debate about the tools it uses and the goals it pursues. Those of us interested in the evolution and future of the Internet should take notice.

Most of the discussion about the circles in books, magazines and websites has been devoted to the physical methods that may be used to generate them: from wooden boards, rakes and brooms to beams from hovering platforms (my personal choice) or even orbiting satellites. Sadly, the social engineering aspect, which represents an equally great achievement, has rarely been mentioned. For me that aspect is the most fascinating part of the crop circle phenomenon, and I submit that the dialogue we have seen on Boing Boing illustrates it well. What we have here is a remarkable example of misdirection around a stunning experiment that remains in full view of a wide public that consistently fails to ask the right questions and keeps re-asserting bogus answers.

The unveiling of the "Doug and Dave" hoax itself was a notable example of media promotion. The two British retirees enjoyed front-page articles in the international press and special placement on prime time on world TV programs, a treatment usually reserved for major world events or announcements supported by heavy, professionally-managed advertising budgets. Their "revelation" had an immediate, irreversible effect of locking the concept of crop circles as a hoax in the mind of a very large public, most notably the academic and 'intellectual' community.

As we saw in the responses to my previous posts it is extraordinarily difficult to dislodge such a certainty and re-open the minds of people to alternate views once they have satisfactorily locked onto such an easy, convenient explanation. The presentation of new facts (such as the node explosion that lies beyond the technical capability of our friends Doug and Dave, or the recent announcement that the military had, in fact, deployed beam weapons fired from above) makes no difference in the debate because people just ignore it As we saw, most of the responses to my earlier posts simply re-asserted an existing position (sometimes with considerable aggression) rather than debating the relevance of new data.

This goes well beyond crop circles. For those of us who have followed the development of networks for many years the lessons are sobering. The web is becoming the medium of choice for disinformation and misinformation, including official efforts to inject new "memes" into the culture. Although I remain an optimist about the web as a medium for free exchanges of data and faster communication of high value, it is also a potential tool for propaganda, false rumors intentionally planted and for a range of techniques designed to alter or filter social reality.

This intentional distortion has certainly become a fact of life among ufologists. It seems that every month or so some website claims to have received data from a hidden source, often a "highly-placed" defense or intelligence person, about UFO crashes, live Aliens, secret missions to Mars or contact with hush-hush cosmic locations such as Ummo, Serpo and other wonderful places. The curious thing is that, in cases when it has been possible to reverse-engineer these links, they were often found to originate within the intelligence community or people close to it. The purpose may be to divert attention from real projects, to confuse an adversary or even to release new ideas to test society's reactions. In such situations the community of UFO believers is used only as a convenient resonating chamber: Since the content can never be checked or the origin verified, there is absolutely nothing a researcher can do with the alleged information: photos of bizarre drones that could be digital fakes (or simply the spines of an umbrella thrown up into the air), blurry glows flying over Mexico, official-looking minutes of U.N. meetings that never happened, actual Presidential papers where a few words have been substituted to suggest official contact with Aliens, or pictures of monsters in the woods. These websites attract plenty of attention and a lot of users who in turn amplify the signal with their own fantasies. The process is reminiscent of flypaper: you deploy a device that will make would-be researchers stick to your concept and spend a lot of time discussing and amplifying it instead of going after real data.

The main result is to disturb, drown or negate genuine research into paranormal phenomena, but the intent may well go beyond this effect. Web social patterns have become a strategic global tool. Like the crop circles themselves, they can now be used to alter the public's perception of the present and the future. Mastering such a tool is well worth a few bent stalks of corn.

In an earlier post I reviewed some possible explanations for the crop circle phenomenon, and I noted the various theories left several issues unanswered: Who are the hoaxers and what is their exact role in the charade?

In an earlier post I reviewed some possible explanations for the crop circle phenomenon, and I noted the various theories left several issues unanswered: Who are the hoaxers and what is their exact role in the charade? If a technology is involved, how does it work to actually make the designs? Could it be directed from space or simply from an aerial platform? And why would anyone develop such a beam in the first place? What seemed to me like simple questions raised a surprisingly emotional and occasionally venomous storm of comments on this blog and on other, more specialized, lists. Since we have obviously hit a nerve it may be interesting to drill a bit further.

While New Age believers and skeptics feel passionate about the issue, the educated public and the scientific and technical community have firmly pushed it out of their mind, convinced that all the circles were hoaxes. Even the people who have studied the circles or commented on them may argue for or against their paranormal nature, the possible role of Aliens or the idea that the designs hide an experiment in military electronics, but there is no disagreement about the fact that most of the designs have been made by hoaxers.

Among these fakers are two men, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley whose "revelations" were picked up by the international press with great eagerness (front-page treatment in major newspapers, interviews on CNN and BBC, etc.) when they stated they had fooled believers in saucer landings since 1978 with their technique for flattening crops with a wooden board and a piece of string.

As researcher Patrick Gross writes, "These early crop circles were round, because flying saucers were circular, as "everybody knows", in people's imagination if not in reality." His analysis of the phenomenon can be found on this page, where he articulates the proposition that ALL circles are the result of hoaxers, some of whom are actually artists. Mr. Gross provides links to many other useful references.

I once met several of these artists at a conference in Switzerland, where they were presenting their techniques and the resulting data. When I asked them, "How dare you fool people this way?" they answered that art in general was about fooling people to create a sense of awe, beauty or simply a brief, healthy disconnect with ordinary reality. One of them pointed out that "When you look at the Mona Lisa you think you look at a woman, but you have been fooled: there is no woman there; someone just applied some paint to a rectangular piece of canvas. Well, we do the same thing, except that our canvas happens to be a cornfield."

When you put it that way it is perfectly all right for teams of artists to run through the fields at night and produce things like the spider, the bicycle or more elaborate geometric designs. People like Jim Schnabel have participated in the game and there are even international competitions in circle making, with recognition for the most complex productions. No wonder people are convinced that all the circles are made for fun by a team of humans crushing the corn for kicks when the subject comes up in discussions among scientists or businessmen today.
The difficult question is, "does this explain ALL the circles, or only the relatively simple ones?" The artists I spoke to in Switzerland confessed that some of the extraordinary designs were beyond their ability to produce them. While the initial "weather phenomenon" theory of Terence Meaden and others has not survived, there are still people who firmly believe the complex designs are made by Aliens and some who state they are a warning from Gaia. Among the technical community there are also those who pursue the idea first expressed by Dr. Jean-Pierre Petit, Jean-Jacques Velasco and others, looking to military electronics as the key to the mystery.

My own feeling about the New Age interpretations is frankly negative. Why assume that Aliens are at work here, when the designs show universally human symbols? Even the Mandelbrot set, one of the most perfect displays, is a representation of a human concept. There is nothing new or scientifically profound in any of this. We are not being taught anything. Similarly, the Gaia hypothesis doesn't work for me. When the Earth teaches us something it is usually brutal and very explicit, like the volcano in Iceland, which leaves little to the imagination.

Which brings us back to the beam weapon hypothesis. Until recently it seemed rather far-fetched, which is why neither Velasco's presentations nor my early articles made any impact. Now that disclosures about actual beam weapons are available, including devices acting from the sky and beams capable of harming humans and stopping engines, we have to revisit the issue and look a bit more seriously at the hard facts left unexplained by the hoax explanation.

The first piece of interesting data has to do with systematic differences between those circles where plants are broken by mechanical action and those where some form of energy has exploded the nodes in the stalks. A detailed study of so-called "expulsion cavities" in corn with exploded nodes is found in the report where the authors note: "During the 1990s multiple specific and distinctive plant abnormalities were repeatedly documented in several hundred different crop formations which had occurred in various European countries as well as in the States and Canada. Extensive laboratory examination of thousands of these crop circle plants and their controls by American biophysicist W. C. Levengood established the presence of consistent changes in the circle plants which were not present in the control plants (plants taken at varying distances outside the crop formations, but in the same fields) -- changes which control studies revealed were not caused by simple mechanical flattening of the plants (with planks, boards, cement rollers or human feet)."

For detailed discussion of earlier plant (and subsequently soil) anomalies documented between 1990-2002, see here and here:
That particular line of analysis gets increasingly complex and the controversy is likely to continue for a long time, but other data tends to support the idea that military research is involved.

I have mentioned before that I interviewed a reliable witness who described to me a rather extraordinary device hovering above the fields in an area where circles were commonly found. This man is a professor of physics who is also an avid glider pilot. On that particular occasion he was happily taking advantage of some thermals above the English countryside, admiring the landscape, when he was surprised to see his aircraft reflected in something like a perfect mirror hanging vertically in mid-air. Being of a logical turn of mind he decided to verify the image was not a hallucination, and then he tried to determine the shape of the object by making several turns around it. The thing was cylindrical and covered with a perfectly reflective surface.

While some of my theoretical physics friends continue to argue that a beam capable of causing crop circles could be activated from space, it seems much more likely to me that a low-observable, optically stealthy, hovering platform would be more practical in situations like a battlefield or an urban guerilla flashpoint. Admittedly we are dealing with hypotheticals here, but this would explain the proximity of the circles to classified facilities: the controllers of the device would want to minimize chances that it would wander off and perhaps crash, resulting in premature exposure.

A third argument needs to be mentioned, in answer to the obvious question, "Why would anyone want to develop a beam weapon, and why would it have to come from above?" Part of the answer has already been given in the two disclosures I have quoted before from New Scientist. However the requirements for extremely sophisticated beams go well beyond the applications mentioned in the magazine. In the complex, dangerous range of threats we face today one may need to destroy targets with devices that can create very concentrated areas of extremely high temperature without blowing up whatever building or facility is targeted. Bombing a biological warfare lab, for example, is not a good idea if the result is to disperse a dangerous microbial agent. One could also think of beams that would be used to control the trajectory of a ball of plasma (possibly created by a small atomic explosion) targeted at objects in the atmosphere, in space or on the ground. All such applications would require a long period of development and testing, and would probably be designed as multi-country experiments.

Indeed, during the eighties and nineties there were discreet exchanges of expertise among government agencies concerned with the UFO phenomenon in the U.S., France and Great Britain (and perhaps others). One of the French experts detached to work on this topic with American Intelligence is said to be visible on one of the crop circle videos, mingling among New Age enthusiasts and civilian researchers. Interestingly, much of the classified research conducted in these three countries (while any official interest in UFOs was denied in public statements) was done by microwave experts, including medical researchers specializing in the effect of radiation on living tissue.

From the point of view of rational analysis the weight of evidence is still on the side of the skeptics who assure us that all crop circles are made by artists and lovable, jolly old men like Doug and Dave. But there are facts that don't quite fit, and the alternatives are worth considering. They lead into very disturbing areas, not all of which have to do with physics. In a concluding (fourth) post, I plan to come back to the initial issue raised by the crop circle problem, which is that of the construction and manipulation of belief systems.

]]>http://boingboing.net/2010/04/28/of-flattened-flora-a.html/feed110Crop Circles, Part Deux: Alien Glyphs, Human Myths, Blogging Blisshttp://boingboing.net/2010/04/08/crop-circles-part-de.html
http://boingboing.net/2010/04/08/crop-circles-part-de.html#commentsThu, 08 Apr 2010 14:53:35 +0000
My previous post about crop circles could be considered, among other
things, as a social science test of the role of belief systems in the manipulation of
memes and factual data.]]>
My previous post about crop circles could be considered, among other
things, as a social science test of the role of belief systems in the manipulation of
memes and factual data. One of the meta-questions that interest me has to do with
the spontaneous rejection of new or unpopular ideas, even in the supposedly open, free and
consciousness-enhancing environment of the web.

It seems that what was "forbidden science" in academia is also forbidden
in cyberspace.The specific hypothesis offered--that crop circles are the result of a U.K. defense electronics
development project--only elicited 19 responses discussing the facts or arguing for or against the
idea itself. Among the other 40 responses while the thread was open, 15 asserted their authors' strongly-held
pre-existing belief (the circles MUST be made by Aliens or by hoaxers), 14 simply expressed
a flat rejection with no arguments, and fully 11 responses can only be described as
cyber-bullying: personal insults, whose authors did not even bother to refer to the subject
of the post. What does that say for the ability of new web-based media to support intelligent
debate on controversial scientific issues, censored or strongly discouraged in the
scientific environment?

The kindest response was typically expressed as "this has to be a joke."

So let me take things a bit further and explain why the hypothesis is not
a joke but a logical result from observation and from the process of asking the
right questions.

If we begin with questions like "Could this be done by Aliens?" or "What is
the message of the Glyphs?" as most people have done we can only get
into endless arguments based on personal bias or belief. But what are the
relevant questions?

Early in the history of English crop circles, a French lab listed three critical issues:

(1) does the phenomenon change over time and if so, in what way?

(2) what exactly happens to the plants when they are flattened?

(3) is there something special about the sites?

This led to a formal program of field collection (investigators with precise instructions
sent to gather samples) and the results were presented at various conferences,
notably at a meeting of the Society for Scientific Exploration in Denver (photo below) and
the following year at Stanford University (on August 8, 1990) where I introduced a
presentation by Jean-Jacques Velasco, a researcher with CNES. The data he
offered was as conveniently ignored as it was straightforward:

(1) the phenomenon began with single circles that English and U.S. weather
scientists first tried to explain as atmospheric vortices. Soon there were
multiple circles in various geometric combinations, and in following years
the designs became increasingly complex, leading to the idea that we were
witnessing a classic, step-by-step program of technology development--not
an atmospheric anomaly but not some sort of paranormal effect either.

(2) Given that SOME of the patterns were obviously man-made hoaxes, it was
possible to compare the effect on the plants in genuine versus bogus patterns.
Under the microscope the results were clear: if you push a board across a wheat
field to flatten it, you will break the stalks between nodes because the nodes
are thicker and stronger. But in the unexplained, complex patterns the nodes
themselves were exploded, often keeping the fibers intact.
Conclusion: something was coupling energy into the plants in the form of
heat (as one of the respondents to my first post actually stated). Therefore the idea
of a beam weapon is indeed one of the scenarios to consider.

(3) The crop circles are close to ancient megalithic sites, which excites the curiosity
of New Age tourists from America, but they are even closer to the most highly
classified military electronics labs in Britain. In fact the roads to some of the fields
run between two high fences behind which defense companies are doing research,
and Army helicopters routinely patrol the area.

Answering these three basic questions does not tell us what the beam consists of,
or why it is being developed. It does support the notion that the crop circles are
a technological development designed to calibrate a novel type of focused energy
weapon, since the resolution can be elegantly measured on the ground within the
thickness of a single stalk of wheat. While the tests could presumably be
conducted in remote areas, there must be some distance constraint that dictates
that initial experiments have to be close to the emitting labs.

Atmospheric physicist Dr. Joachim Kuettner of University Corporation for Atmospheric Research discussing the
Crop circle problem with Dr. Jacques Vallee and Jean-Jacques Velasco of Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales
at a meeting of the Society for Scientific Exploration in 1989 in Denver.

I can take no credit for any of this: several groups were involved in the same
research as the French lab and their findings were similarly published
many years ago, including microscope photographs of the plants with exploded
nodes. Labs in the U.S. (Department of Agriculture, M.I.T. etc.) repeated the
tests with the same results. Yet public opinion and scientific opinion ignored
the new evidence and continued to reject any notion that disturbed their
comfortable, pre-conceived beliefs.

This does leave several issues unanswered: Who are the hoaxers and what is
their exact role in the charade? How does the technology work to actually make
the designs? Could it be directed from space or simply from an aerial platform? And
why would anyone develop such a beam in the first place?

I don't claim to have complete answers, but my own hypothesis is that the beams
are produced from a hovering, low observable device. I will discuss these points in my
next post. Regarding the last question -- "why would anyone develop
such a beam?" -- I leave you with yet another intriguing article from New Scientist
(issue of 23 July 2009, article by David Hambling):

Microwave weapon will rain pain from the sky

The Pentagon's enthusiasm for non-lethal crowd-control weapons appears to have stepped up a gear with its decision to develop a microwave pain-infliction system that can be fired from an aircraft.

"The device is an extension of its controversial Active Denial System, which uses microwaves to heat the surface of the skin, creating a painful sensation without burning that strongly motivates the target to flee. The ADS was unveiled in 2001, but it has not been deployed owing to legal issues and safety fears.

But of course, one can think of many other interesting applications, in the lethal category.

In Sept. 1991, I published in a New Age magazine my own hypothesis about the Crop Circles phenomenon. I speculated they involved a military aerial device (not a space-based instrument) for generating such designs using focused microwave beams, such as a "maser." At the time nobody wanted to hear that the beautiful pictures in English corn fields might be crafted by a technical team inside some lab, bouncing signals from a hovering platform and using individual corn stalks as simple pixels to calibrate a lethal device. So my paper was met with dead silence.

More recently, however, New Scientist has run an article titled "Microwaves could defuse bombs from afar" (April 18, 2009 issue). It begins: "The next weapon in the US army's arsenal could be a laser-guided microwave blaster designed to destroy explosives. The weapon, called the Multimode Directed Energy Armament System, uses a high-power laser to ionize the air, creating a plasma channel that acts as a waveguide for the stream of microwaves."

These things are typically revealed 30 years after they are tested, which fits well with the heyday of the crop circle frenzy.

It is interesting--and sobering--that nobody picked up on the New Scientist article either. The New Age folks were too busy deciphering the Alien Glyphs... while the scientific community had been hoodwinked by a few cleverly revealed and widely publicized hoaxes, and had long dismissed the whole thing.

New Scientist went on:

The device could destroy the electronic fuse of an explosive device or missile, such as a roadside bomb, or immobilize a vehicle by disabling its ignition system.... Further work on the
system could also allow it to be used against people, delivering electric shocks. The weapon's range will depend on the laser-generated channel. Previously such channels have been limited
to tens of meters, but (the Army) believes it may be possible to extend this to a kilometer or more.

This is consistent with the hypothesis I had presented, of beams from a low-observable dirigible (such as the object an English friend of mine, an Oxford physics professor, saw from his glider in England, which was a perfectly-reflecting cylinder) using corn fields as a convenient calibration target. Why this isn't obvious to the paranormal research community is a complete puzzle to me.

The development is hidden in plain sight, which is the best way to keep something secret, and it is camouflaged sociologically by clever use of misdirection (actual hoaxes, later "revealed" to the world press) and the public's continuing belief in first-order alien communication.

In our age of rational science the occult has never been more in demand: Angels and demons are popular, the Da Vinci code and lost symbols fascinate audiences worldwide and Hollywood is eager to turn out more movies with a paranormal theme. So why is it that so many of these stories
seem flat, and fail to reach the level of insight into hidden structures of the world true esoteric adventures are supposed to promise?

Perhaps the answer has to do with the failure of gifted directors to come to grips with the enormity of the unknown issues of human destiny, or to pose the fundamental questions their esoteric subject would demand. We go away charmed by artistic visions, dazzled by the pageantry of cardinals in red capes and titillated by women in black garters but the Illuminati only scare us because of the blood they spill, not the existential issues they should transcend. They behave like any other gang of thugs, even if they utter their rough curses in Latin rather than street slang, cockney or modern Italian.

The circumstances that made this point clear to me arose when I watched again two movies within a few days, namely Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut and Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate. I was struck by the suspicious similarities and the enormous differences between them. In earlier viewings both had thrilled me with the superb photography, the great acting, and the expansive landscapes. A second experience made me wonder about the themes themselves: the contrast was striking. The story line of Eyes wide shut turns out to be not only unbelievable but downright silly. It could be summed up as "Handsome young millionaire doctor tries to get laid in New York for three days and fails!" In the process he has joined a fake black mass and deciphered a few facile occult clues but there is no point to any of it. I do understand that Kubrick, like Umberto Eco in Foucault's Pendulum, was attempting to say something profound about magic and eroticism but he only produced clichés, vague references to tired grimoires and gratuitous gropings: those black garter belts again.

The Polanski movie, in contrast, is dangerous and captivating from the very first frame. It combines a profound understanding of hermeticism with the breathless beauty of a quest for infinity. It completes it with the exquisite aesthetics of an adept who knows what should be exposed and what should remain hidden. Polanski has recognized the power and genuineness of his cause, his story, his landscapes, while Kubrick only exemplifies the well-trained academic intellectual who scrutinizes the magical from the outside and just doesn't get it, flashing the conventional symbols before us like so many obligatory props. Occultism is not science-fiction. The splendid photography doesn't fill the emotional gap.

It was striking to me that both movies took the protagonists to very similar situations and to the same places - the region of Pontoise in fact, so charged for me in magical memories. Should we suspect that the scripts circulated from desk to desk in Hollywood, as is so often the case, and that both stories emerged from a bit of plagiarism? Let's not go that far: perhaps it was simply a case of lucky occult coincidence.

When it was revealed that the U.S. resorted to torture to extract information from prisoners, many people my age must have had a very somber thought for the thousands of young Americans who had given their lives on the beaches of Normandy in a brave effort to rid the world of governments that engaged in such shameful practices. Two other thoughts flashed to mind: the stupidity of giving up the high moral ground at a time when the U.S. had earned so much goodwill thanks to its stand on democracy and human rights; and the pointlessness of such interrogations, often stated by our military experts, since the victims will generally admit to anything in order to stop the pain.

My friend, French Résistance leader Jacques Bergier, who was tortured multiple times by the Gestapo, made the ludicrous "confession" that his network planned to invade Corsica. In reality they were looking for heavy water and for Werner von Braun's rocket base.

As a child of World War Two who remembers its limitless horrors, my revulsion at the practices of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib was so great that it took me a while to realize the more positive implications: if our henchmen used waterboarding, a practice so primitive it placed us in the same hateful historical imagery as the caves of the Inquisition and the cellars of the Nazi, this can only mean that all the fancy interrogation drugs developed in classified labs in the 60s and 70s have failed: there is no truth serum. We should be relieved about that.

We already knew that LSD, once hyped as the ultimate key to the mind, did little more than propel you into colorful delusions. But evil doctors had other tricks and claimed to be working in secret on even better, kinder biotech ways to crack open the human soul and read it like a book. Using everything from neurotoxin derivatives to functional MRIs, the State would soon overcome personality defenses, in the interest of our collective safety. It would finally control not only our deeds but our thoughts as well, thus achieving law and order on a grand scale.

Evidently the scheme hasn't quite worked out as predicted: If we could simply slip a little green pill to the bad guys to find out their plans, we wouldn't have to resort to messy medieval practices that don't work. So let's go back to the legal methods of interrogation recommended by the professionals. And let's thank waterboarding for the realization that our intimate thoughts, prayers and dreams, flaky though they may be, will remain safe from chemical violation a little while longer.]]>